This is a shorter version of the longish Yocto Project’s Quick Start Guide. The official guide is more complete (explains all details) and give instructions for several distributions, whereas this guide simply lists each step and is focused on Ubuntu. So you could use this guide to start the build, and during the build (which will last a while), read the official guide to actually understand how it all works.

If you are short in disk space (The build requires up to 50GB), add the following line to edison-6.0-build/conf/local.conf:

Shell

1

INHERIT+=rm_work

If you have a multi-core build machine, also set BB_NUMBER_THREADS and PARALLEL in local.conf, respectively to twice and 1.5 times the number of cores in order to speed up compilation.

You can then start building the OS binaries for sato, a GNOME mobile-based UI:

Shell

1

bitbake-kcore-image-sato

core-image-sato build requires 45 GB to build. If your space is limited you could build core-image-mininal (17GB required) which is a distribution with command line only.

The build can take a very long time. I’ve built core-image-minimal in a Virtual Box machine running Ubuntu with 1GB RAM and it tools nearly 2 days. core-image-sato took nearly 48 hours in a notebook running Ubuntu 10.04.

Once the build completes, time to run qemu:

Shell

1

runqemu qemux86

Using pre-built images

Create a working directory, download and extract the binary toolchain:

I have tested this in Ubuntu 11.10 (Virtual Box), the build completed, but for both methods qemu only showed a black screen. Running those images in Debian Squeeze 6.0.3 (Virtual Box) and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Native) worked perfectly.